Recently I’ve been doing some work with the CTP1 version of PerformancePoint 2007 and I thought I’d share with you an issue I came across last week.
I was running PerformancePoint on a VPC and for various reasons had started to run out of disk space. No problem I thought, I’ll create a secondary virtual hard drive and move some files across to it. So far, so good. Then for whatever reason (it was around midnight) I decided it would be a good idea to detach the .mdf files for the PerformancePoint Staging and Application databases and reattach them on my new E: drive.
Again so far, so good. Then I started up the PerformancePoint Business Modeler to find that it no longer showed my application or model sites as being available. Words were spoken and my wife informed me that it was late and for goodness sake go to sleep (or something like that).
Then I started up the PerformancePoint Planning Admin Console and although the application was showing in the list after connection, on clicking edit to view the details it all came up blank and again no models showed in the site list.
OK, I’ll move the .mdf files back to their original location; that should solve it. Wrong! Still nothing.
On further investigation and a good root through the stored procs, it looked like metadata about the applications etc stored in the Windows Sharepoint Services config database was to use a non-technical term ‘out of whack’, mainly the object version which you can’t update as it is stored as a timestamp data type. I then tried to view the metadata and check the web service interfaces using the MetaDataManager http://localhost:46787/MetaDataManager.asmx and found that on invoking the GetSystem service that it came back with nothing (usually shows details about the app, file locations for forms and reports etc etc).
For me it meant a rebuild and some rework but I hope Microsoft do allow you to move/migrate the files in future versions or otherwise companies will have to know exactly how much disk space they will need going forward for the entire life of an application.